Scribbling alone in your notebook one night, you create the first draft of your Magnum Opus. The tangy smell of ink never left your body after you crafted a scroll to bring to your editor. Yet as she reads it, you learn that it is almost identical to a story written in Prague forty years ago. Cryptomnesia - a blog about literature and writing by author Joseph Patrick Pascale.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Cryptomnesia in Literature

Imagine the long hours spent crafting the perfect novel -
revising each sentence to perfection, fleshing out each character, and tying
the plot into a cohesive whole - only to discover that the novel already
exists. Another author wrote it a long time ago. At some point in the distant
past, you read it and then forgot all about it. When the memory came back to
you, you mistook it for your own original idea.

That, in essence, is cryptomnesia. While it may sound like
something out of the Twilight Zone, there is evidence to suggest that this is a
very real phenomenon. For some time, I feared the idea of unknowingly
plagiarizing in my own writing. Do you know how many short stories I powered
through as assigned reading in college that I can’t even remember the titles or
authors of anymore? All these things could be bouncing around in my faulty
memories, just waiting to come out as bursts of “inspiration.”

“Maar finds the coincidence of plot, narrative and name
'’striking.’' He does not accuse Nabokov of plagiarism, since ‘'he was a genius
on his own.’' (As some are too rich to steal, apparently, others are too smart
to crib.) Maar prefers the word ''cryptomnesia,'' a process by which things are
learned, forgotten and then mistaken for original inspirations when recalled.”

Reading it now, I found that the Times article came to a
similar opinion as I have after contemplating the problem of cryptomnesia over
this past decade. Caldwell describes the novel as “a word game sustained across
some 300 pages,” and says of Nabokov, “Honing a distinctive literary voice
obsessed him.” The writing in Lolita is so rich, the style so artful, that even
if the plot and characters come from a misinterpreted memory, it doesn’t dampen
the art of the novel at all.

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure
unfinished masterpiece” ― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

For all we know, what happened with Nabokov wasn’t even
cryptomnesia, but a purposeful allusion to an obscure short story that had a
great impact on him. To reduce the novel to the bare minimum of plot and
characters is to lose most of its significance. Writers and artists draw
inspiration from past works and create their own versions all the time. There’s
nothing inherently immoral or plagiarist about this. In fact, perhaps it’s our
culture’s idea of plagiarism that is in the wrong here.

Creativity and Pure Originality

Back in college I took an Advertising Copywriting class, and
the professor always liked to say that creativity wasn’t about being totally
unique or original - it was about finding a new combination of old ideas. I had
a professor with a similar mentality when I took a medieval literature class in
graduate school. He said that originality was overrated in our current society.

Purposeful “Cryptomnesia” Throughout the History of
Literature

As a point of comparison, let’s jump back to the 14th Century
and examine "The Father of English Literature." Geoffrey Chaucer didn’t think it
was sagacious to admit to purely inventing stories. Even when he was making up a new
story, he would claim it was a translation from another language to add more
authenticity to it. This is a very different mindset than the prevailing
attitude in our society that artists must be “original” and “unique” in order
to be creative. Look at what many consider to be Chaucer’s best work (no, notThe Canterbury Tales, which is more famous, but
incomplete), the poem Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385). The story is set during the
siege of Troy, with characters from ancient Greek literature. Chaucer’s source
for this poem was
Boccaccio'sIl Filostrato (ca.
1335-1340), and Boccaccio had based his on a French poem called Le Roman deTroie (The Romance of
Troy, ca. 1155-1160) by Benoît deSainte-Maure, which
is itself a retelling of the Trojan War, probably largely based on Homer’s poems (ca. 1260-1240 BC). That’s the history
of the poem working backward from Chaucer, but moving forward from Chaucer,
some 200 years later we find Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida (ca. 1602), which was
inspired by Chaucer’s poem. An interesting fact the Wikipedia entry notes is:

“The story was a popular one for dramatists in the early
17th century and Shakespeare may have been inspired by contemporary plays.
Thomas Heywood's two-part play The Iron Age also depicts the Trojan war and the
story of Troilus and Cressida, but it is not certain whether his or Shakespeare's
play was written first.”

So there could have been a lot of versions of this story
going around at the turn of the 17th century. I’m sure if you looked into it,
you could find additional modern retellings of this story dating to our age.

But my point in tracing all these different versions of
Troilus is to show that originality was never a requirement for writers
throughout history. The fact that Shakespeare’s version essentially shares the
same plot he took from Chaucer’s doesn’t invalidate Shakespeare’s as a
masterpiece in its own right. To boil it down to just the threadbare plot and
characters is to lose so much of what people celebrate in Shakespeare. Would it
be any different if Shakespeare had indeed read the poem or seen another play
version of it, but forgot and thought the play was entirely his own creation?

Cryptomnesia: Total Recall - The Case of Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything I’ve considered thus far assumes that the
cryptomnesiac’s later version of the work is distinctly different from the
original, subconsciously remembered version. Even though they share
similarities, the new version is decidedly different.

But what do you make of the case of Friedrich Nietzsche, the
philosopher - or anti-philosopher (as may be more appropriate)? Or in this
case we could simply call him a novelist, since we’re discussing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. According to Shell of Man:

“Friedrich Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra includes
an almost word for word account of an incident also included in a book
published about 1835, half a century before Nietzsche wrote.”

The fact that it is “almost word for word” is what makes
this case of cryptomnesia seem different to me. It was Carl Jung who discovered the
duplication of the earlier story and declared it cryptomnesia. According to
Frances Oppel in Nietzsche on Gender:

"The piece of text 'secretly crept up and reproduced
itself' [quote from Jung] in "Of Great Events" (Z 2). Jung recognized
the story about seamen stopping on an island to hunt rabbits, having read it in
his grandfather's library. He wrote Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, who confirmed
that she and Nietzsche had read the same book in their grandfather's library,
when Nietzsche was eleven. This, Jung informed his Zarathustra seminar, 'shows
how the unconscious layers of the mind work.'"

The case of Nietzsche is particularly fascinating, since
there’s the tragic downward spiral of his descent into madness late in life.
Could it be that at a young age his genius mind had near total recall of
memories, but as he aged and his brain faltered, whole chunks of intact memories
came back to him with the sources missing?

From the point of view of one phobic of cryptomnesia, the
near-perfect reproduction of a text can add no new value to the art - to argue
that, one would enter the farcical territory of Borges, with his Pierre Menard who perfectly reproduced Don Quixote to
the adulations of critics who could now apply contemporary literary theory to
the “new” work.

But even in Nietzsche’s case, his one section of
cryptomnesiac text is only four pages of a work over 300 pages long. It’s the sort of book where a passage from another text wouldn’t be out of place,
even purposefully inserted, since it’s full of allusions and often features
Nietzsche’s subversive interpretations of extant ideas. All that said, it’s
another case of cryptomnesia with virtually no harm done.

Cryptomnesia and Plagiarism in Our World

It seems to me that when Jung was looking into cryptomnesia,
it was because of a Freudian fascination with the subconscious. However, when people
talk about it today, it’s connected with a cultural fear of plagiarism - in
this case, a plagiarism so treacherous that you don’t know you’re doing it.
This fits into a conversation where college students are frequently told that you should never “plagiarize
yourself,” by
which instructors mean not to reuse papers from previous courses.It’s evident that there can be serious
concerns of actually plagiarizing word-for-word, stealing content, and
falsifying sources, but it seems to be something growing beyond these arenas.

Our society has developed an uncomfortable relationship with
plagiarism and copyright infringement. However, they seem to be foolish fears.
Fear of plagiarism related to school is rooted in cheating. School has been
slow to adapt to the Information Age, with its abundance of that which used to be scarce, and
the extreme fear of plagiarism shows a slowness to adapt. Instructors drill the
fear of plagiarism into students so much that students think they can’t write a
paper without citing every line because they’re writing on topics they’re just
learning, and obviously they had to learn that information from somewhere, like
their textbook.I suspect that something
similar is going on with the battles that extend copyright well beyond its
original intention - a slowness, an inability, and a fear to catch up with the
fast pace of technology and the way people are using it to change the world.
These realms stand in stark contrast to the blogosphere, where content and
links are freely exchanged.

There’s a great essay on this topic by Jonathan Lethem called “The Ecstasy of Influence” - although it’s
not technically an essay - he subtitles it, “A plagiarism.” He patched the
whole thing together together from other sources, turning it into a completely
new work. Toward the end of the essay, he claims:

“Any text is woven entirely with citations, references,
echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast
stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous,
untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas.
The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the
actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism.”

Although, actually, while Lethem clearly is claiming this,
he’s using the words of Roland Barthes and Mark Twain
mashed together into this one quote. Fear of plagiarism is permeating our
culture to the point that people are forgetting that we learn by absorbing the
ideas of others and appropriating them to our own uses.

Cryptomnesia: A Writer’s Greatest Enemy?

So, do you have to fear that your greatest ideas were
subconsciously stolen? Do you think writers, artists, or anyone should be
worried about cryptomnesia? Do you think it’s fine that the same stories have
been repeated so often throughout the history of literature, or were hacks like
Chaucer just being unoriginal? And where does plagiarism and copyright law fit
into this conversation?

4 comments:

I think it's kind of a false equivocation between academic and artistic writing: citation is necessary in academia to maintain credibility; in art, the aesthetic relationship between words, the fabric of the ideas being presented, is paramount, while in academic writing the focus is on the ideas and the research itself. In other words, art is in the medium, academe in the message. Therefore, academic writing requires vigilant and vigorous citation in order to avoid one taking advantage of someone else's hard work. What a student of history (or any academic discipline) aspires to is writing that, after having analysed and acknowledged the work of others, no longer requires citation because the ideas themselves are original.

On the other hand is a writer like Nabokov, who (except in this particular case with the word "Lolita"), as he writes for his 'ideal reader,' someone as erudite as himself, attempts in no way to take credit for his parhelia, but pays tribute to his inspiration through his own form of linguistic citation. This is one of the reasons Nabokov is such an enchanting writer: his world grows richer as we get older and more well-read. After reading Poe, for example, and beauty of his The Ballad of Annabel Lee shines through the beginning of Lolita as Nabokov 'cites' it repeatedly: winged seraphs; princedom by the sea; her name.

The problem is a culture unwilling to acknowledge its literary and historical tradition, due to a belief in a modern golden age brought on by technology. And academic citation (acknowledging the giants whose shoulders we're standing on) is not a symptom; symptomatic is the obsession with plot twists and a disgust for citation.

Thanks very much for your insightful feedback! I think making the distinction between scholarly writing and other forms of writing, such as creative writing, is something that would alleviate these issues. Right now, anything accused of "plagiarism" automatically takes on a negative connotation, but maybe plagiarism is a word that should only be used in the context of professional scholarly work. It still doesn't seem right to me that undergraduates in 101 courses are so worried about plagiarism when they're still trying to synthesize basic ideas of their field into their mind. At the lowest level of scholarly writing, rather than talk about plagiarism, they should categorize it as cheating (taking whole pieces of text from other sources unquoted) or citation mistakes (not a severe issue, something expected from students who are learning, but without threats of expelling them from school).

I love your explanation of Nabokov and "linguistic citation." There's really no significant difference between determining that a section of fiction or poetry is "stolen/plagiarized" or it being an allusion to another work. It's not as though Joyce released the first edition of Ulysses with footnotes. Authors expect their readers to hunt down allusions.

I agree completely on the distinction between academic and creative works. In creative works, I think the term "derivative" is one used with less negative connotation. In Japan (see; all the derivative anime that is readily available) it's definitely a positive term, even!

Joseph Patrick Pascale

How to Get a Promotion when your Boss Is Trying to Kill You, a comic literary novel by Joseph Patrick Pascale, will be published by Waldorf Publishing in 2018. Information will be available at: www.josephpatrickpascale.com